The Kick Inside At 40: How Kate Bush Let The Weirdness In And Changed Music Forever

In 1979, an interviewer asked Kate Bush — who had recently become the first woman to reach #1 on the UK charts with a self-written song, “Wuthering Heights,” at age 19 — “You’ve made it. What else is there to do?” Bush eagerly replied, “Everything!”

And she did. Bush, a cult figure in America who is regarded as a national treasure in the UK, created a legacy that has influenced countless musicians, many of whom might not even realize she made their work possible. How would most pop stars tour without the headset microphone, which was created for Bush’s 1979 Tour Of Life, using a wire hanger? Producing her own work in an industry in which a small percentage of women are producers, Kate Bush has maintained a level of control and integrity within her spellbinding music that few artists have matched. She opened the door for all artists, but especially women, to experiment more radically in their audio and visual work. As Imogen Heap once said, “When I was 17 and getting my first record deal, it was the likes of Kate Bush who had contributed to labels taking me seriously as a girl who knew what she was doing and wanted.” To be frank: Without Kate Bush, none of your faves would exist in the same capacity. That might sound hyperbolic, but there is so much, from turning live performances into multimedia, theatrical spectacles, to making music videos years before MTV’s debut, to wearing a swan dress — that Kate Bush did first.

Her groundbreaking legacy of experimental yet accessible, inspiringly individualistic work begins with the extraordinary debut album that turns 40 this weekend: The Kick Inside. Released when Bush was 19 in 1978, it included songs she had written as early as age 13 and introduced the world into Bush’s wild imagination. Arriving in a year otherwise dominated by disco and punk (“Wuthering Heights” replaced Abba’s “Take A Chance On Me” as the UK’s #1 single) this imagination felt “strangely out of time” and singular. The album’s focus on female sexuality, its use of voice as an instrument, and Bush’s unique storytelling techniques — particularly her exciting use of fluid narrative identity, in which she changes identities and narrative point of view with every song — created a new, unprecedented model for women in music. The Kick Inside (referred to as TKI from now on) made the world a safer place not just for women musicians but also for freaks and outcasts everywhere, and its anniversary is well worth celebrating.

Of course, first we need to address what will make most people either adore or despise TKI: That Voice. As the album begins, a wailing, impossibly-high-pitched voice grabs (or repels) the listener as it sings that opening line “mooooooviiiiiing straaaangeeeer.” Deborah Withers, author of Adventures In Kate Bush And Theory, wrote that the pitch of her voice is “an assault on the normal parameters of vocal modulation.” I feel it is no coincidence that, within a music criticism field dominated by straight white men, her most acclaimed album is 1985’s Hounds Of Love, on which her voice deepened enough for them to be able to handle it. Dismissive and condescending quotes from male critics about Bush’s early work, both from the ‘70s and now, are too numerous to collect here, but Suede frontman Brett Anderson’s assertion in the BBC’s The Kate Bush Story that in her early work she was “finding her way … she hadn’t quite found herself and all that early stuff of her dancing around in leotards is a little bit am-dram” (is he forgetting how he dressed in the early ‘90s?) and that Hounds Of Love is “the zenith” of her artistry, typifies the traditional critical approach to Bush’s work.

I disagree with Anderson and his ilk. Kate Bush wasn’t fumbling or “finding her voice” — TKI establishes her voice as not just a voice but also as an instrument. Throughout her entire career Bush almost never used backup singers, and instead created her own backing vocals herself by singing in different pitches, in discordant and revelatory ways. This is displayed to great effect on almost every TKI song: turn the volume way up and marvel in how the backing vocals on each song swoop upwards and swoon downwards to create a landscape seemingly independent from the main vocals, especially in “L’Amour Looks Something Like You,” “Moving,” and “Kite.” Bush uses her four-octave range as an instrument most famously and strikingly in “Wuthering Heights,” in which she sings in an almost dog-whistle-like pitch to embody the character of Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost in Emily Brontë’s novel. For most musicians, the voice is what they use to express words; for Bush, it is a remarkable tool that helps contribute to unique soundscapes.

Beginning with its title, which describes the sensation a pregnant woman feels as her fetus kicks, TKI is an album about bodies: the way they move (“Moving,” “Kite”), the desires they express (“The Man With the Child in His Eyes, ”“Feel It,” “L’Amour Looks Something Like You”), the way they both die and generate new life (“Room for the Life,” “The Kick Inside,”), and the way they sometimes return to haunt their lovers (“Wuthering Heights”). The album opener, “Moving,” invites listeners to move in order to free their minds: “As long as you’re not afraid to feel… Don’t think it over, it always takes you over/And sets your spirit dancing.” The importance of movement and the body is crucial to TKI, especially because Bush herself trained in dance prior to its release and performed elaborate, endearingly earnest dance routines in her performances and videos. Bodies and movement are an unusual focus for any album, much more so from one by a teenage British girl in 1978.

Reared in the country known for stiff upper lips and repressed sexuality (full disclosure: this author is part-English), Bush sang frankly in songs written in her teens about lust, and her narrative voice on TKI possesses an active feminine, sexual gaze. In the album’s second song, “The Saxophone Song” she imagines herself “in a Berlin Bar” as she watches a saxophonist play and becomes a voyeur filled with desire, a traditionally masculine position. On the album’s second half, Bush becomes franker, and downright explicit, about her active sexuality. In “Feel It,” she and her lover go “back to your parlour” where “Locking the door/My stockings fall onto the floor, desperate for more.” She stretches out the word “more” with her inimitable voice for as long as she can, mimicking the sound of a woman in ecstasy. She then sings, “The glorious union, well, it could be love/Or it could be just lust, but it will be fun/It will be wonderful.” In case there was any doubt that Bush was singing about sex, she then explicitly describes penetration: “keep on a-moving in, keep on a-tuning in/synchronize rhythm now.” What teenage girl was celebrating the “fun” of a possible one-night stand in pop music in 1978, much less the “sticky love inside” (a cringeworthy lyric, yes) it produces in “L’Amour Looks Something Like You”?

TKI is also revolutionary because it establishes Bush’s narrative style as fluid and multiple; her songs are short stories each written from a different narrator’s perspective rather than from her own point of view. This writing style stands in stark contrast to the traditionally personal style of music focusing on love and heartbreak that continues to dominate the charts. “I often find myself inspired by unusual, distorted, weird subjects, as opposed to things that are straightforward. It’s a reflection of me, my liking for weirdness,” she said in 1980. Unlike the majority of pop/rock artists, The “I” in Bush’s music is rarely Bush. Her songs are not confessional, but are rather short stories told from the points of views of a diverse range of narrators. From Bush’s songs, we can know about themes that interest her, but Kate Bush herself rarely speaks in her work; her narrators, who occupy multiple genders, races, and historical times, do instead. This is a deeply radical break from traditional “confessional “ songwriting, especially for women up to that point. Consider that the most acclaimed female musician of the time, and probably of all time, Joni Mitchell, is most-lauded for her confessional album, Blue.

“That’s what all art’s about — a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can’t in real life,” Bush said, explaining her writing technique. “Like a dancer is always trying to fly, really — to do something that’s just not possible.” As a result, Bush’s ever-changing but always unusual topics on this and all her albums enraptured many outcasts, weirdos, and freaks, and created space to, as she sang on her later album The Dreaming’s “Leave it Open,” “let the weirdness in” to popular music. Rufus Wainwright summed up her appeal for outsiders when he said, “She connects so well with a gay audience because she is so removed from the real world. She is one of the only artists who makes it appear better to be on the outside than on the inside.”

The song that perhaps best captures what makes TKI revolutionary is its title track, which merges all the aforementioned topics: use of voice as instrument, feminine agency, and Bush’s fluid, narrative-story writing technique on unusual topics. “The Kick Inside” is based on the English folktale “The Ballad of Lucy Wan,” in which a brother impregnates and then decapitates his sister. Bush’s take on the story is sneakily radical, especially from a feminist perspective. In the folktale, the sister only speaks briefly before her brother kills her, but Bush rewrites the story from the sister’s point of view, literally giving voice to a history of women silenced by male violence, and changes the story so that the sister actively chooses her own death instead of being her brother’s victim. Bush said in 1978, “The sister becomes pregnant by her brother. And because it is so taboo and unheard of, she kills herself…The actual song is in fact the suicide note.” While the death is still tragic, the fact that Bush re-envisions a violent narrative passed down through centuries of patriarchal generations from a woman’s point-of-view and places the story’s narrative action in the woman’s hands is a subversive act.

One might say that this act of feminist re-visioning parallels the narrative of Bush’s own career. Instead of drawing from normalized, “feminine” confessional-based musical forms, she created odd, polarizing sounds with her voice to tell stories of “Strange Phenomena”, and later took complete sonic control over her work as a producer and multi-instrumentalist in a still-predominantly male-dominated industry where women are often denied agency or forced to compete with one another (Britney vs. Christina, anyone?). Bush co-produced 1980’s Never For Ever, which was the UK’s first #1 album by a British female solo artist, and started producing her work completely on her own for the rest of her career starting with her 1982 masterpiece The Dreaming. Over the course of her career she has continued to break records: in 2014, she became the only artist besides the Beatles and Elvis Presley to have had eight albums simultaneously on the UK’s top 40 chart, and her 2014 Before the Dawn live shows — her first live performances since 1979 — sold out in minutes.

Perhaps most importantly, beginning with The Kick Inside she has inspired a wide array of artists to “let the weirdness in.” Lady Gaga covered Bush’s duet with Peter Gabriel, “Don’t Give Up,” because she wanted to “make something that young people would hear and learn something about Kate Bush”, and her theatricality has its roots in Bush’s so-bizarre-they’re-brilliant live performances. Björk frequently cites Bush as a pivotal influence on her musical “form”, saying “I remember being underneath my duvet at the age of 12, fantasising about Kate Bush,” and even sent Bush of a demo of herself covering Bush’s “Moving” in 1989. Lorde played “Running Up That Hill” before the shows on her Melodrama tour, and Bat For Lashes’ Natasha Khan said of Bush, “As an artist myself, [she’s] helped me to not be frightened to put my vulnerability as a woman [in my work] and in that, be powerful.” Bush’s influence is also felt in hip-hop, especially due to her early use of sampling, best seen in her sampling of the Gregorian chanting from Werner Herzog’s film Nosfertu The Vampyre in Hounds Of Love’s “Hello Earth.” One of her biggest champions is OutKast’s Big Boi, who has repeatedly called her “my favorite artist of all time,” and Tricky from Massive Attack said of Bush’s song “Breathing,” which features the line “breathing my mother in,”: “I’m a kid from a council flat, I’m a mixed-raced guy…totally different life to Kate Bush, but that lyric, ‘breathing my mother in,’ my whole career’s based on that.” Even Chris Martin “admitted” that Coldplay’s “Speed Of Sound” “was developed after the band had listened to Kate Bush.”

Countless other artists, ranging from Tori Amos to St. Vincent to ANOHNI, have cited Bush as a foundational influence, and she has inspired a rabid global following of fans to embrace the wild, imaginative, limitless nature that her music embodies and represents. Beginning with her groundbreaking debut, 40 years later the world has been indelibly altered by Kate Bush’s impact, not only in music but also in the hearts of all fans whose lives her work has enriched.

On February 17, 1978 the 19-year-old British singer Kate Bush finally released her debut record The Kick Inside to the world. Although Bush seems remarkably young for such a debut, she was even younger when she began to write some of the tracks. While still attending school, she and her family produced a demo tape of over 50 original compositions and shopped it around to record labels. Nobody took the bait until David Gilmour of Pink Floyd got a hold of it from a mutual friend and, impressed by Bush’s evident talent, helped her by getting the then 16-year-old a professionally produced demo tape by Andrew Powell, who would go on to produce Bush’s first two full-length albums. This demo tape was eventually sent to Bob Mercer at EMI, who signed her but put her on a two-year retainer. Mercer claims he thought that, essentially, Bush was too young for either failure or success – either might ruin her – while Bush believes that he just didn’t want any other label to swoop in and get her.

Regardless, Bush was officially under contract with EMI at the end of those two years and began recording her first album in August 1977, although two of the songs “The Saxophone Song” and “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” were recorded two years previously. The quality of the music and unique voice behind the lyrics is no surprise when you learn that Bush had been writing music basically since the age of 13. By the time she was 19, she was past most of her artistic growing pains – if she ever had any.

The album is a creature unto itself. Bush mixes pop-rock music with piano and orchestra arrangements, all of which underline her elastic and clear soprano voice which does the most in conveying mood and rhythm as it bounces around the words as if they aren’t even words anymore. To quote one of the songs, you “feel it” much more than you may think about it.

That primitive quality to her music is foreshadowed in the first few seconds of the album, which feature a selection of whale song. The song that follows, “Moving,” is written in tribute to the emotion and freedom Bush felt through her interpretive dance and mime lessons with Lindsay Kemp. As Bush described in a 1980 Sounds magazine interview, Kemp “fills people up, you’re an empty glass and glug, glug, glug, he’s filled you with champagne.” In the same interview Bush explained her reasoning for including the whale song, claiming that whales “say everything about ‘moving’… [they] are pure movement and pure sound, calling for something, so lonely and sad.” The song works as a good introduction to the rest of her album, and to Bush as an artist that we’re getting to know on her debut album. Here her voice cuts above the surprisingly bold piano and drums, while moving in a way that feels flexible and rhythmic.

The follow-up track, “Saxophone Song,” is simple but in a way that indicates Bush knows how to efficiently communicate an idea without meandering unnecessarily. It’s a song from a fan of a musician – who plays the titular instrument –singing about how she is moved by his music. This track, as well as “Moving” and several others illustrate how Bush can write about things in her life, that are true to her young experience such as taking dance lessons, reading Brontë, and being an awed fan of a musician, and she can turn them into songs that feel adult and general enough to appeal to a listener of any age, as well as stand the test of time.

The next track “Strange Phenomena,” ponders the odd coincidences and synchronicities of life that make you feel connected to something larger and part of a powerful intuitive system. It’s an introduction to Bush’s tendency to write about relatively intellectual subjects, which comes up a few times on this album alone.

Bush’s most conventional tracks are “Kite” and “James and the Cold Gun.” They’re the most pop-rock and boisterous sounding of the 13 songs, and relatively conventional in their lyrics and delivery. Sandwiched between those two songs, however, are the first two singles and two of Bush’s biggest hits, “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” and “Wuthering Heights.” The former song was written by Bush at age 13, and recorded at age 16. The music on the track is straightforward, and Bush’s vocals are the most clear and unaffected here, allowing us to hear every word. The “child” in the title can simultaneously be applied to who the man is looking at and, as Bush has said, the “little boy within” most men. It’s an astonishingly mature song to imagine a 13-year-old writing, which adds a sort of haunted quality to it. The single made it to #6 in the UK, and won Bush the 1979 Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding British Lyric.

“Wuthering Heights,” the album’s first single at Bush’s insistence, went to #1 on the UK charts, making it the first time a female singer-songwriter topped the charts with a self-penned song – and it remains Bush’s only number one single. The song was written at age 18 after Bush watched a mini-series adapted from the Emily Brontë novel of the same name. In the song she sings from the dead character Cathy’s perspective as a ghost, begging to be let inside and back into her love Heathcliff’s arms, perfectly capturing the wild and uncontainable emotions depicted in the novel. This song and its videos also brought to a wider audience Bush’s incorporation of movement to her performances. The UK video features Bush in a white dress surrounded by white mist and other dancing projections of herself. The more well-known video was made for the US and has Bush in a bright red dress, dancing among the woods and hills.

The second half of the album features a trilogy of songs about sex and sensuality – “Feel It,” “Oh to Be in Love” and “L’Amour Looks Something Like You.” They’re great examples of Bush’s ability to evoke mood and imagery through her voice, such as when her voice soars in the second half of the phrase “oh to be in love – and never get out again” to mimic the euphoric mindset the singer is in.

The final songs return to the more intellectual and metaphysical inspirations. “Them Heavy People” is about Bush enjoying the opportunity to learn as much as possible to expand her mind, extolling the pains and joys of pushing yourself and “opening doors you thought shut for good” to become the best version of yourself and find the “heaven inside.” “Room for Life,” is an appreciation of the power of women. Bush sings “like it or not, we keep bouncing back, because we’re woman.” The final track “The Kick Inside,” is similar to “Wuthering Heights,” in that it’s an adaptation of an existing work – in this case a “murder ballad” called Lizie Wan – and sung from the perspective of the female character. In this case, however, it’s a girl who is impregnated by her brother who then kills her because of it. It’s a bitterly ironic song to come after “Room for the Life,” which celebrates how woman has “room for a life… in your womb.” It’s a dark end to a strange album, but it’s a fitting end. It underlines that Bush is a fresh talent who is interested in plumbing the depths of human experience and psychology in her music and is not afraid of any source of inspiration.

The album went on to be quite successful in the UK, peaking at #3 on the Albums Chart – and only slipping to #9 by the end of the year. It was certified gold in 1978, in the UK and New Zealand, and platinum in Australia and Holland. In the United States, things were different.

EMI’s Bob Mercer felt that Bush’s relative lack of success in America was due to her being a poor fit for our radio formats, as well there being few outlets for the visual presentation “central to her appeal.” Bush made a rare US appearance on Saturday Night Live in December 1978 but that didn’t help her album crack the Top 200 Billboard albums chart. “The Man With the Child in His Eyes” did reach #85 on the American Billboard Hot 100, which was the only Bush single to do so until 1985.

It’s hard to explicate why Bush lacked success in America at the time. Maybe people really didn’t know how to market this odd girl and her odd music? Perhaps they were worried about scaring away some audiences by fully displaying her bold music and frank lyricism when she was still relatively young – which also made her musical identity a mystery to potential fans. It’s interesting to see the US cover of The Kick Inside, which is much simpler and even childish in its depiction of Bush than any other cover was. The album ultimately had six different covers, for the UK, US, Canada, Yugoslavia, Japan and Uruguay. All besides the US and UK are essentially artistic head shots of Bush. The UK artwork is colorful, bold, artistic and sensual, in a fair approximation of the album’s tone as a whole. The US version makes her look younger than she does on any of the other album covers, as well as coy and unassuming – an image totally disconnected from the album’s content. The Kick Inside and Kate Bush herself has since found a fan base in the US, with “Wuthering Heights” voted as #5 on Pitchfork’s Top 200 Tracks of the 1970s list in 2016. However, The Kick Inside has still never been certified anything in the US.

Despite the delay and occasional missteps from the studio, The Kick Inside remains a smart and assured debut for a singular talent. It excellently communicates how Kate Bush the artist thinks and feels, and illustrates what kind of music we can expect from her, as she confirmed our expectations with nearly every new release in the decades that followed.

Life of a SongKate Bush’s Wuthering Heights — from Emily Brontë to Alan Partridge

Some songs are so distinctive they spend their afterlives being celebrated in peculiar ways

Some songs feel so distinctive when they arrive that they spend their afterlives being celebrated in peculiar ways. Take Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”, released 40 years ago last month. As his TV alter ego Alan Partridge, Steve Coogan sang it at 1999’s Comic Relief. For the same charity telethon in 2011, Noel Fielding aped Bush’s famously theatrical dance moves, and wore a red dress like the one she wore in one of two promotional videos for the single. Then things went crazy: more than 300 Kate Bushes, similarly clad in flowing scarlet, recreated the video in Brighton’s Stanmer Park in 2013. By 2016, The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever was doing the same in 18 cities internationally, including Sydney, Tel Aviv and Amsterdam.

But however outlandish Kate Bush’s debut single seemed, “Wuthering Heights” was not a song without precedent. Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick was singing in an upfront, wild style about a 19th-century literary classic back in 1967 (“White Rabbit”riffed off Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and became a countercultural classic, as well as a US top 10 hit). Five years before “Wuthering Heights”, David Bowie was making deeply unusual, piano-led songs for the pop market, and indeed, the young Kate Bush was a fan. “He was one of my great heroes when I was growing up,” she told Fader magazine in 2016. “A brave artist, so unusual.”

Bush was incredibly young — signed at only 16 to EMI — and looked like a ’70s magazine cover star, but she wasn’t static and silent. In “Wuthering Heights”, she wails and whoops in a high pitch, her melodies swooping and diving like a bird going in for its prey. Her song’s subject matter — Emily Brontë’s only novel — was also intellectual, and this teenager talked about it intellectually. “When I first read Wuthering Heights I thought the story was so strong,” Bush told Record Mirror in February 1978. “It was a real challenge to précis the whole mood of a book…and this young girl in an era when the female role was so inferior, coming out with this passionate, heavy stuff.”

Bush was captivated by Cathy Earnshaw, Heathcliff’s foster sister, and great lost love, whose ghost visits the story’s narrator, Mr Lockwood, in the novel’s third chapter. Bush said that her commitment to the character was helped by the fact that she was born Catherine, not Kate; her family called her Cathy when she was a child. “I found myself able to relate to her as a character,” she said. “It’s so important to put yourself in the role of the person in a song… when I sing that song, I am Cathy.”

Bush’s commitment to “Wuthering Heights” went into her career planning, too. She fought EMI to make it her debut single (they preferred the straighter, poppier “James and the Cold Gun”). Its release was also postponed from November 1977 because Bush hated the picture they had chosen for its cover. This delay was fortuitous: Wings’ “Mull of Kintyre” had just begun its nine-week reign at number one at this point, becoming the first British single to sell more than 2m copies. “Wuthering Heights” reached number one in March 1978, becoming the first UK chart-topper to be written and performed by a female artist.

So connected to Kate Bush’s image is “Wuthering Heights” that successful cover versions of the song have been few. Pat Benatarrecorded a guitar-heavy cover for her 1980 album Crimes of Passion, while Norwegian electronic pop band Röyksopp have included a version in their live sets since 2010. In 2011, Bush’s original took on a new life when a slowed-down 36-minute version became an internet viral hit. Then came the video re-enactments, kicked off by UK performance art group Shambush! at the 2013 Brighton Fringe Festival. Men and women took part, videos circulated online, and re-enactment events were set up all over the world.

Similar events across Australia also became fundraisers for domestic violence charities: in Canberra and Melbourne, thousands of dollars were raised for frontline response services. And to think all this joy and generosity came from one distinctive song, written by a teenager writing, singing and dancing to her own formidable tune. We let her in.

It must be remembered that when I shot the photographs of Kate for her first album, ‘The Kick Inside’, no one had heard of her before. She was very young and even EMI didn’t expect her first album to be anything more than a minor success. While the record company were confident that she was indeed a considerable talent, they were as surprised as anyone when she topped the charts. I had listened to the tape of Wuthering Heights before the shoot and my recollection was that, while it was interesting, I thought she had a rather shrill voice and I did not expect it to do very well.

What do I know?

Kate arrived at the studio with her father and a car full of bits of wood and painted paper from which he constructed the kite as it appears in the photograph. I rigged the rather fragile kite on the black painted wall of my studio with ropes and a metal bar which was strong enough for her to hang from.

In the meantime Kate was in the back room with a makeup girl being covered in gold body paint. The image was entirely Kate’s idea and Steve Ridgeway, the art director and I simply did more or less as we were told. The idea had come from the Disney animated film ‘Pinocchio’ and the scene when Jiminy Cricket floats past the whale’s eye using his umbrella like a parachute.

The shoot went well of course but I had never been fully briefed on just how it would be used. I had been instructed to shoot it on black which was how it appeared on the single. Used that way, it worked just fine. Unfortunately, when it was composited against the light yellow background of the eye, the dark shadows around her legs and on the bottom of the kite didn’t work for me. In spite of it being probably the most famous record cover I ever shot, I never used it in my portfolio, feeling that this technical problem was an embarrassment to a perfectionist like myself.

Again… What do I know?

Kate returned to my studio a few times after the shoot, once to collect the kite and a few more times just to say hello. Shortly after her record was released I held one of my well known studio parties and invited Kate but sadly by that time she was far too famous and busy to attend although she did send her apologies via the record company… (sigh!) – Jay Myrdal FRPS

_________________This will be my monument, this will be your beacon when I'm gone...

Welcome to What’s This Album About?—the podcast that dive’s deep into lyrics. I’m Bobby Waller, and this episode is our second experiment in covering a classic album. Normally, we cover new albums on this show. But back in December, we discovered it was the fiftieth anniversary of the debut album of one of the music industry’s most celebrated lyrical geniuses, Leonard Cohen. And so we just had to commemorate it. This time around, we’re commemorating a 40th anniversary by analyzing the lyrics of another of groundbreaking debut album—Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside.

Like Lorde, whose album Melodrama we reviewed just a few months ago, Kate Bush was a teenager whose debut album seemed to come from nowhere and wowed the world with its incredibly precocious songwriting. Bush was nineteen when The Kick Inside was released—thirteen when its earliest songs were written--and critics were stunned that such a young songwriter could pen such breathtakingly original work.

The song we’re hearing right now is “Them Heavy People,” and I’m playing it because it’s the song that gave me the hook I needed to talk about the lyrics of this album. The “heavy people” referred to in the song’s title are not physically heavy people; they’re people with heavy thoughts. More specifically, they’re the authors and other teachers whose ideas have influenced Bush’s own thinking. Here’s the one line in particular that caught my attention.

♪ They open doorways that I thought were shut for good They read me Gurdjieff and Jesu

The Gurdjieff she refers to in this line is George Gurdjieff, early twentieth century writer and spiritual teacher who advocated the development of full human potential through the harmonious integration of mind, emotion, and body. Interestingly, Bush mentions all three of these components of human being in this song. There’s mind in this line:

♪ They arrived at an inconvenient time I was hiding in a room in my mind

She says she was hiding in a room in her mind when “them heavy people” arrived and helped her achieve a mental breakthrough. And then there’s body and emotion in this line:

It occurred to me, as I revisited “Them Heavy People,” that the integration of mind, emotion, and body is a theme that runs not only through this song but also through the entire album and arguably throughout Bush’s entire career.

So let’s look at these three components of human being—mind, emotion, and body—as they appear on The Kick Inside, beginning with mind.

The Kick Inside stands out as the product of an inquisitive mind. It’s full of the kind of cultural and literary references that are generally considered too cerebral for pop music but Bush refuses to back away from. This is album’s title track. It’s called “The Kick Inside” because it’s sung from the perspective of a young woman who has become pregnant with her brother’s child and can now feel the baby kicking inside her womb. The premise for the song came from an English murder ballad that appeared in an anthology of late nineteenth century English and Scottish folk songs collected by Harvard English professor, Francis James Child. Think of it! In 1978, when this album was released, the most audible female voices in the recording industry were singing lyrics like this…

♪ Get down, boogie oogie oogie

…and this…

♪ Dancin’ to the beat, feel the heat, I’m movin’ my feet

…songs written by men about inane dancing experiences. By contrast, Kate Bush was writing her own songs based on the works of great intellects like Georges Gurdjieff, Francis James Child, and, most notably, Emily Bronte.

This is “Wuthering Heights.” It’s based on mid-nineteenth-century author Emily Bronte’s novel of the same name and focuses on a moment when the main character, Heathcliff, looks through a window into the darkness of night and sees his wife’s ghost who entices him to join her. This idea of a portal between life and death was so captivating to Bush’s mind that she insisted on “Wuthering Heights” being the album’s lead single. And her instinct paid off because “Wuthering Heights,” despite its heady origins, reached the #3 position on the British pop charts, making Bush the first woman in English history to chart with a song she herself had written.

So that was mind. Now let’s look at emotion.

Emotion is ubiquitous on The Kick Inside. I actually took the time to count and discovered that nine of its thirteen tracks include the word “feel” or “feeling” in the lyrics. What’s more, every track is overtly passionate to the core.

Take this song, for example. This is the album’s second single, “The Man With the Child in His Eyes.” In it, Bush sings about her affection for her lover, a man whose innocence remains unravished by the usual cynicism of adulthood. Just for fun. Let’s compare it to 1978’s highest charting song sung by a woman about her affection for a man.

This is Debbie Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” which is #3 on Billboard’s list of Hot 100 Singles of 1978. It was written by a man, songwriter Joseph Brooks, in the voice of a woman who waited a long time for a man to come into her life and imbue it with meaning. That set-up alone is bound to place restrictions on how genuine the emotion of this song can feel, but listen to sound itself.

The pace is slow, but the beat is extremely steady—more deliberate than felt. Boone’s singing is in lock step with the pulse of the instruments, and her enunciation is extremely precise—almost mechanical. For contrast, let’s re-listen to “The Man With the Child In His Eyes.”

Compared to Debbie Boone, Kate Bush sounds like an opera singer. Her range is broader, and the overall feel is more theatrical. Rather than hitting the beats with mechanical precision, she moves her voice around the beats, according to the feeling of the moment. The result is an album that is full of emotional urgency from start to finish.

Okay, so, where are we? We’ve been looking at the three components of human being according to George Gurdjieff, an author who strongly influenced Kate Bush. We covered mind and emotion and now, last but not least, is body.

The concerns of the body are all over The Kick Inside. Bush was remarkably unashamed of physicality, as we can hear in this song, “Feel It,” which is a joyous exaltation of sex.

♪ Here comes one and one makes one The glorious union. Well, it could be love, Or it could be just lust, but it will be fun It will be wonderful

Bush’s lyrics are overtly sexual here, but they’re very different than the overtly sexual lyrics we hear in “Boogie Oogie Oogie.” They’re her own words—not words written by a man—and so they come across as more frank than licentious.

There’s also the song “Room For The Life” and it’s a song about women’s reproductive capabilities. In it, Bush urges women to be unbothered by the way men sometimes belittle women and to take heart in the fact that women are the well from which all of human life springs.

♪ There’s room for a life in your womb, woman Inside of you can be two, woman There’s room for a life in your womb, woman

For Bush, women’s physicality is not merely for the pleasure of men; it’s a necessity for all humanity. There’s a message of women’s empowerment here that was not often found in pop music of its day and which, happily or sadly, is just as politically poignant in 2018 as it was in 1978.

Finally, I’d like to round off this look at the physicality of The Kick Inside with this song.

This is a song called “Moving,” and it’s an homage to Bush’s dance instructor, the legendary Lindsey Kemp, who also taught David Bowie. The word moving is being used here as a double entendre. On the one hand, Bush is alluding drawing our attention to the fact that Kemp taught her how to move her body. On the other hand, she is saying that she finds him emotionally moving as well.

And that, I think, is the implicit point that underpins the entire album. The mental, the emotional and the physical are not supposed to be separate. They’re supposed to be intertwined. “Them Heavy People” is about intellectual predecessors, but it’s also about feelings of gratitude. “Feel It” is about both the physical and the emotional feelings associated with sex. Because for George Gurdjieff, and for his fan, Kate Bush, cultivating all three of these aspects of human being is what makes us the most complete versions of ourselves that we can be.

That’s it for this episode of What’s This Album About? If you like what we do, take a moment to review us on iTunes. It’ll help people like you find podcasts like ours. Join us next time when we review Brandi Carlisle’s brand new album, By the Way, I Forgive You.

Until then, I’m Bobby Waller, reminding you to stay balanced—and to keep your ears open because the more you listen, the more you love.